Herding the Fro-Yo Sheep
It was 5:55 p.m. on a Thursday, nearly time for supper, an hour when no one has any business getting themselves a sweet treat. Yet fifty-odd people were standing on line along an aesthetically grim stretch of Seventh Avenue, waiting to purchase cups of frozen yogurt from the new West Village location of Myka, a Madrid-based dessert chain.
One witness, a young man in a white T-shirt and athletic shorts, with three-day stubble, wasn’t having it. Walking alongside the queue, he shook his head in disbelief. “Baa!” he shouted at the idling fro-yo pilgrims. “Baa! Baa!”
The young man was Ezra (he prefers not to reveal his last name), a twenty-seven-year-old native New Yorker, one of five children raised in South Brooklyn by parents he describes affectionately as “modern hippies.” He is the brains behind the Instagram account @sheepofnyc, which, since its début, in May, has attracted more than seventy-five hundred followers.
As virality goes, this is not a big number, but the passion that the account has aroused dwarfs its reach. Some commenters on Ezra’s posts view his feed as a referendum on who is and isn’t a real New Yorker. Anyone who waits on line for fro-yo must be a “transplant” who needs to “move back to Ohio,” one person wrote. A @sheepofnyc clip of a long line outside Caffe Paradiso, on Elizabeth Street, home of the social-media-vaunted Salted Brown Butter and Oat Latte, has engendered such comments as “This is a microcosm of everything wrong in current culture” and “In Spanish, we say, ‘Pendejos.’ ”
Ezra himself prefers a more minimalist approach to offering commentary on the latte line, or any line. In the clip, he is heard saying, “Baa! Baa! Baa! Baa! Look at all these sheep. I’m just a shepherd tryin’ to herd the flock . . . for coffee.”
Long-line madness is not new to New York. If your memory goes as far back as 2013, the era of the Cronut bubble, you will recall the hour-long waits in SoHo outside Dominique Ansel Bakery. But this spring’s fresh bloom of lines has broken locals’ brains. The Village is home to not only Myka but a new outpost of the fro-yo destination Mimi’s, on University Place. After an arduously long winter, these narrow, modestly sized shops have been—with a suddenness and intensity that only TikTok and Instagram can foment—thronged. Most of the line-waiters are young. Many of them post trophy pics of their quarry; Myka offers a particularly photogenic swirl of vanilla yogurt topped with green pistachio sauce and toasty crumbled baklava.
It’s this aspect of the line phenomenon—that the behavior is driven by algorithms and the influencer economy—that gets under Ezra’s skin. He pronounced himself more baffled than angered. “It started as a joke,” he said. “It blew my mind seeing all these lines everywhere in New York. So I was, like, I’ll just go around taking little videos, calling these people sheep and ‘baa’-ing at them.”
Ezra stays inconspicuous by filming the lines with a pair of Ray-Ban Meta sunglasses, which synch with his iPhone. A strapping, handsome guy who works in real-estate development, he is hardly the picture of a social-media guerrilla. He realizes that @sheepofnyc has found its audience via the same algorithmic alchemy that drives the fro-yo fervor. One post, filmed by a friend, of an absurdly long line of people waiting to enter the SoHo clothing store New York or Nowhere, has been viewed nearly a million times. It helps that the friend is better at “baa”-ing than Ezra is, emitting a convincing ovine bleat worthy of a flock in County Clare.
Ezra now receives five to ten guest submissions a week. He hasn’t posted many of them, usually because they’re poorly shot, have no audio, or are too mean. He has also received overtures from clothing companies looking to collaborate with @sheepofnyc on T-shirts. One mockup came with M.T.A.-style lettering that reads “SHEEP CENTRAL STATION.” Another bears an image of a sheep Statue of Liberty holding a selfie stick instead of a torch.
“I don’t care about monetizing this,” Ezra said, sitting on a bench where some Myka customers were eating their fro-yo. He also doesn’t want to come off as a scold. “A lot of it is tourists, and I feel bad,” he said. “This city is amazing, every part of it. I guess the message is ‘Stop waiting on line.’ Go walk the West Side Highway.” Instead of wasting time on the line for L’industrie pizza on Christopher Street, he suggested, “hop on a subway into real Brooklyn and try the best pizza ever, at Di Fara.” There’s usually a queue there, too, but the Di Fara line is the hard-won result of decades of pizza excellence. The shepherd of @sheepofnyc may be young, but he is wise enough to get that on-line life, like online life, is not really living. ♦